Consumers go social and the enterprise will follow…
Ever since our consumer love affair with social networking applications there has been a gold rush or land-grab going on in the enterprise. But mapping the consumer model into the enterprise will not work. To me this is common sense but if you evaluate what has been done by 99% of the enterprise social based tools you will find they have directly copied the consumer model into the enterprise.
Why social in the enterprise? Again I think this is common sense. Within the enterprise people come together to get something done. Therefore the enterprise has people connecting to get thing done and is therefore social. Right? You could also say that people need to communicate and therefore they are being social. This I expect is not news to anyone since no matter where you look there is something going on with respect to the enterprise social land grab. If you use Salesforce then you know about Chatter. If you do a little Google you will find things like Yammer. If you follow Cisco then you know about the solution they are bringing to market that makes your phone and router more social. If you are a SAP user than you know about their new social solutions. And even CAD is getting into the game with things like social product development or collaborative 3d live (how many times have we heard this one)… No matter what you do in the enterprise you do not need to look hard to see the land-grab going on.
So is the enterprise social? I think yes!
Does the consumer social model work in the enterprise? Certainly not!
What do you think?
This is a really good question! And I agree the replies to your own questions just before.
Off hand, I can think of a few things that might result in enterprise social computing being a different beast.
1.) Security – The information you share with say, your project team, may be different than what you can share with other in the company or with customers. The consumer model is only beginning to think about this (e.g. different sharing options on Facebook).
2.) Legal – There are a lot of questionable things people do in a public setting. What will be the issues if this is done by an employee during work time with company sponsored software? At the minimum, I think companies need time to come up with good guidelines and policies.
3.) Fear – Will people worry that their boss or HR is watching everything they do? Will they then post dull, safe posts that no one will want to read or skip posting all together? Or will the fear be that if you get too plugged in, you won’t get your real work done?
4.) Participation – The more participation you get the more value you get. Can enterprise social media work if it is just 10% of the company?
This is just a quick list I’m throwing up for discussion purposes so don’t read too much into this reply
Mark let try a reply to the points you raised:
1) Security – I think you are right in that the context of the relationship matters. But this situation is not new due to enterprise social software. This situation already exists with respect to the tools we already use, al la email.
2) Legal – Again I do not think this is new and therefore the policies are already in place. Companies have a code of conduct policy already and HR rules.
3) Fear – This may be new in people’s minds but in reality this again is an existing situation. IT can already control where you search and what sites you log onto and how big the attachments are. People should not be fooled into thinking that their email is private, it is not, it is the property of the company. I’ve even worked in a place that monitored phone calls against key words.
4) Participation – This is new and I think a tricky one and one where the enterprise model will differ greatly when compared to the consumer model. Can you imagine following every person you have some working relationship with? It would be like multiplying your inbox by 100 or maybe a 1000, you would end up with nothing but noise… get nothing done… be a slave to the feed, not the work.